


in focus

by spoke



Category: Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad)
Genre: Genderfluid Character, Other, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 06:38:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18794974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/pseuds/spoke
Summary: In which an ill-advised trip into the forest is eventually set to rights.





	in focus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [winteryserpent (silencedancer)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silencedancer/gifts).



> Thank you for the lovely request, and a chance to reimagine one of my favorite fairy tales! I hope you enjoy my take it on. 
> 
> And so many thanks to my beta, Kairos, without whom it would have been a poorer and less clear story. Any remaining mistakes are entirely mine.

He’d been gone for months before I started hearing stories about those woods we loved. Thought to myself then that I should have checked there first, but I always thought... Well, we’d promised to only go there together, hadn’t we? It was a wild, strange place for all its beauty, and too easy to imagine being lost forever. Neither one of us wanted to be lost alone.

Or so I believed. 

And then I woke up late one morning, and I’d come to down to find my mother with worry written all over her face, and his mother nearly in tears, and they both wanted to know if I knew where he’d gone. When I told them if he’d gone anywhere, I’d be there with him, she broke down crying.

Everything should have been a haze after that, or so all the romantic stories he used to love assumed. Our Heroine wastes away, wandering about in a wistful search for her lost love. Only I’d never been the wistful sort, and something within me had gone cold. Everything seemed so much sharper, after that. 

Almost a year of going through life, without any interest in anything that wasn’t practical. I just kept feeling as if I were watching for something, and then I started hearing stories. People going into the woods and not coming out, or coming out scared out of their minds, or coming out changed. Most of it was clearly nonsense, but there were some details about a stranger accusing people of taking flowers.

I’d never seen much in the way of flowers out there, but we certainly used to pretend there were. So it wasn’t hard to feel a flash of hope, like this was what I was waiting for all this time. 

I worried a little that I’d give myself away getting ready to go looking for him, but my mother just seemed pleased that I was happy for a change. You would think she’d have questioned why. His mother certainly would have, and not because she was his. I love her dearly, but mine has always been a little ...unobservant. 

Which is probably why she didn’t hear me leaving in the middle of the afternoon, either. 

The walk to the woods was too long to be safe in the dark, and besides who knew what else might be going on out there. I was pretty sure the stories were mostly nonsense, because he wasn’t the sort of person who’d hurt people that way, but. What if he wasn’t alone in there? And the longer I walked, the more convinced I became that he couldn’t be, because otherwise he’d have gotten himself home instead of worrying us all sick.

By the time I made it to the entrance of the woods, I was in what he’d have called a ‘state’. It occurred to me that maybe I’d been in shock all this time, and that going in after him right now was maybe not my best idea, but how could I come that far and then turn back? 

He probably would have been able to, is the sad thing. He’d have had a plan and everything, at any rate.

My plan was walk into the woods yelling his name and demanding he come the hell out, the coward. Which did about as much good as anyone could expect, basically none, and I found myself a bit hoarse and walking along one of our favorite paths. It took me a minute or two of stewing to realize the path should’ve ended awhile ago, and the trees looked older than I’d seen before. What was more, and it seemed to me to happen as soon I noticed the trees were wrong, was that it started to get lighter out of nowhere. Not sunlight, or moonlight, but its own odd kind that was pleasant enough to see by, but also decidedly creepy.

And then there were flowers growing along the path. Flowers he’d drawn before, and only showed to me. Well, I stopped dead in my tracks, but the path seemed to keep moving around me, which made me feel a bit like throwing up, and I ended up in a beautiful garden at the end of it.

Or it reached the garden at its end and dumped me off, who can really say with a thing like that. 

Well, I could’ve stood there glaring at it all, but when the path had already dumped me here, how much good would that have done? I walked into the pretty and obviously evil mess, and yet. Even though I knew it was beautiful, all I really noticed were the things that reminded me of him. His flowers, every single one of them.

It was like whatever had taken him didn’t know what a flower was. Or didn’t care for the ordinary sort, maybe. Which was fair enough, because his were decidedly better, but they could get their own damn flowers, whoever they were. That’s what I was thinking when I found the rose. Or, well, it had started off in the general shape of a rose, but they didn’t usually have edges quite so swirly, let alone the little heart bits cut out of the petals. 

That one was always a bit excessively romantic, and finding it just made me so angry I snatched it without even thinking, really. Which is how I cut myself on the thorns, and the next thing I know he was there.

“How can you be so practical about things half the time, and such an idiot the other?” He asked, only his voice... wasn’t right.

I slowly looked up, following hands that weren’t quite shaped right and yet moved in almost the same way his would have, bandaging the cut. All the way up to face that was his and yet she was definitely the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. She laughed quietly when she saw my expression, and looked away a little sheepishly, and I yanked my hands back.

The expression on her face when I exploded is a memory I’ll probably treasure to my bloody grave. And beyond, if whatever’s next provides the opportunity. 

“Did you run away with the bloody fairies because they could turn your body into a girl’s?! Did you actually bloody run away and leave us all worried sick for - UGH, alright, that’s not fair but dammit woman!” I nearly screamed, and watched her change from cringing back in fear to confusion to outrage, and wasn’t that a welcome sight. 

He never did get angry enough, but she wasn’t having that problem. “How long have you known, you absolute ass?” She hissed, eyes narrowing and fists clenched.

“How long haven’t I? You just. Are? I have no idea how I know, but you are definitely a girl and always have been. More of one than I am, at any rate, I’m honestly not sure what I am really but you -” I took a deep breath, shaking my head and trying to get ahold of myself a bit, because her eyes had flown wide again at that last bit.

“You don’t know what you are, but you’re sure what I am.” She said this carefully, picking at her words like she was navigating a swamp. 

“Weeell.. you see, I’d been trying to figure out myself forever, and while I was I learned about how some people aren’t what their parents assumed when they got the baby home? Which is definitely you, but. How do you bring that conversation up?” The way her frown deepened, I knew she was about to insist I should have, and I shook my head as she started to object. 

“And what would we do about it if we did? What if you didn’t want to deal with my problems on top of your own? I didn’t want to lose my best friend over something as stupid as what you call yourself, when that’s your own business. And. I’m sorry?” By this time I was cringing in on myself pretty badly, not sure what she’d think of me now either. Catch me actually admitting that though. 

I’m the tough one, if you haven’t guessed by now.

She stared at me for way too long, before taking a deep breath and whispering “I’m sorry too.” 

And then it was tears and babbling and confused laughter, and for my part wishing I’d said something years ago. Not least because we’d not have been having this conversation in a bloody possessed forest with who knew what kind of fairies around somewhere. Eventually we pulled out of our hug, and spoke at the same time.

“We’ve got to get out of here.” 

“Alright then,” I said, and took her hand to start walking, and tried to ignore that she wasn’t moving for a few steps. When she stayed still, though, I turned around and sighed. “Well. What did you do?” I waved to indicate her general herness, and she frowned. 

“I. Made a deal? Which may have involved being engaged to a fairy queen.” She twirled her rose in her hand for a moment, and I just breathed, knowing I needed to wait it out. So much more practical than me, most of the time, but when she decides to do something stupid the girl goes all out. “And, it may have turned out that from her perspective, the point of the deal is to have a non-fairy to sacrifice to something she refuses to actually tell me anything about. I only found out because her chambermaids are gossipy little things.” 

“And we can’t just walk out of the forest because?”

“Because I’m sort of tied to the forest and if I go out I’ll. I’ll...” 

It took her starting to tear up before I realized what she didn’t want to say, and that was a horrifying thought. She couldn’t walk out of the forest.

“Shit.” I hissed, and buried my face in my hands. “Okay,” I muttered without removing them, “is there any way you can leave?” 

“I think so. Halloween night is when this is supposed to happen, and apparently once before someone got saved by his girlfriend? It isn’t the word they used to describe her, but she must have cared for him a lot. Though they’ve changed the way things happen because of that..”

Well, working from what she’d told me, it wasn’t that hard to come up with a plan, and a good thing too with barely a week before Halloween. I left, and the path dumped me right at the edge of the woods, the creepy little thing. I’d have kicked it if I didn’t have so much work to do. Also, to be fair, I was a little worried it might grab me and who knew where I’d end up. I managed to get home in time that mom wasn’t even worried, though my newfound interest in dressing up the next day made up for that.

Nevermind what I was looking to wear, though I’d always been especially experimental about Halloween costumes. This was almost too normal, by comparison. Still, I got ahold of something I hoped was good enough, and went out to my ‘party’ a bundle of jittering nerves and nausea. 

When I got back to the woods and laid her rose on the path, it took me straight to the fairies, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as all that. Or maybe it wanted to see me eaten by whatever, who can honestly say? I stepped off into a party fancier than anything I’d ever seen in real life, though some things in the movies might have come close, and went straight up to one of the dancers. Uncomfortably tall fellow, had to crane my neck back to make eye contact. “Care for a dance, m’lord?” I asked, and saw her eyes shining through for a moment before we began.

When the dance was over, there was a terrible spinning feeling and profoundly unfriendly laughter before everything settled. Dancers were moving around me again, choosing their partners, and - a girl again, closer to my height, paler skin than hers ever was. “My lady,” I bowed, and kissed her hand as I rose “might I have this dance?” 

And again, and again, and again through the night, while they laughed less and less every time, I found her. As the night wore on, the forms they gave her became increasingly repulsive, as if the damned queen thought that would put me off. It only showed us both that we’d been right, they hadn’t really learned anything from the last time. 

Change shapes they might, but they’d not learned to change their natures, and it wasn’t in their natures to understand ours.

The clock struck midnight with my arms around some sort of ...well, frankly she looked a bit like cat vomit had gotten up to go for a walk. It had felt as if the forms had been getting closer and closer to whatever would actually put me off, specifically, and this was definitely their best attempt.

I kissed her anyway while the queen shrieked, knowing this was the moment. I could feel her through it and found myself comparing the difference in her lips, then and now, the same way I’d noticed her hands before. I threw the stupid heavy cloak over her as soon as she was her own self again, sensing more than seeing the fairies rage around us. There was an awful sound then, the nature of which we’ve never been able to agree on, and suddenly the woods were just woods again.

And she was still herself.

And that, of course, was when we realized we’d never thought about how we were going to explain any of this to any of our parents. Which was a far less interesting story, though I could say it ended well eventually? But another time, perhaps.


End file.
